In the dark early days of 1942, Britain’s Atlantic lifeline was stretched to the breaking point. U-boats were sinking Allied merchantmen faster than they could be replaced, and to this threat was added the lurking menace of German surface raiders. The previous spring, the Royal Navy had run down and sunk the modern superbattleship Bismarck, but other potential surface raiders remained at large. The most dangerous of these was Tirpitz, sister ship to Bismarck.

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Tirpitz was a monster, more than 50,000 tons of thick armor and 15-inch guns. She was so strong that no single British-or American-battleship could stand up to her alone. If this behemoth got loose in the North Atlantic convoys lanes, the results for the Allies could be catastrophic. With his usual gift for words, Winston Churchill summed up the importance of destroying Tirpitz: ‘The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this ship.’

Just then Tirpitz was holed up in Norwegian waters, along with the pocket battleships Lützow and Admiral Scheer. The Royal Navy was making every effort either to neutralize this dangerous fleet or to get it to come out and fight-but thus far the British had had no luck. The danger was, of course, that the German ships would sortie when major British fleet units were elsewhere and savage a convoy covered only by corvettes, trawlers and destroyers. If the Royal Navy could bring Tirpitz to battle and damage her, there was only a single port in all of Axis Europe where she could be repaired. That refuge was the French town of St. Nazaire.

This small port city was home to the Forme Ecluse Louis-Joubert-better known as the Normandie Dock-a huge dry dock built especially to accommodate Normandie, the pride of the prewar French passenger fleet. Bismarck, damaged in her fight with Hood and Prince of Wales in May 1941, had been heading for St. Nazaire when a Royal Navy Fairey Swordfish aircraft got a torpedo into her and a pursuing British naval force caught and sank her. It was to St. Nazaire that Tirpitz would also run to be healed of torpedo, bomb or shell damage. The British were determined to take away the big ship’s only refuge-and thus Operation Chariot was born.

St. Nazaire and the Normandie Dock sit on the estuary of the Loire River, about six miles from its mouth. In the spring of 1942 the river was almost a mile wide and quite shallow, except where a single big-ship channel had been dredged close to the north bank of the estuary. The dock itself was enormous, a basin 1,148 by 164 feet. It was opened and closed by monstrous 35-foot-thick gates, so massive that the British called them ‘caissons.’ They loomed a gigantic 167 feet by 54 feet square, and were designed to move on huge rollers.

The winch houses and pumping stations were constructed on the same scale as the great dock itself. To one side of the dry dock lay the St. Nazaire and Penhouet basins, large artificial anchorages generally used by small German warships. The St. Nazaire Basin, the larger of the two, served the U-boats, which reached the estuary of the Loire through a set of locks. Some of the St. Nazaire Basin’s concrete U-boat pens were in use, while others remained under construction.

Nearby lay other port facilities, locks and bridges, wharves, underground fuel tanks for the U-boats, and a power station. The whole complex was defended by some 100 guns of various sizes, infested with searchlights and frequented by minesweepers and coast defense vessels. The city itself was home to 5,000 or more German soldiers and sailors, including a whole infantry brigade.

To overcome these formidable defenses, the British knew they would have to call on their best troops-the commandos. The British have quite a history of daring raids. They had staged dozens of small-boat expeditions against the Spanish and the French in the days of sail. And they were the authors of the audacious World War I strike against Zeebrugge, Belgium, in which landing parties shot up German coast defenses while the navy scuttled three old cruisers in the canal that led German U-boats to the North Sea.

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